Submerged: Adventures of America's Most Elite Underwater Archeology Team

Summary

Experience a kaleidoscope of real-life underwater missions, ranging from ancient ruins covered by reservoirs in the desert Southwest to a World War II submarine off the Alaskan coast; from the Isle Royale shipwrecks in the frigid Lake Superior to the USS Arizona in Pearl Harbor; from the HL Hunley, the first submarine in history to sink an enemy ship, in Charleston Harbor to the ships sunk by atomic bombs at Bikini Atoll, and much more.

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Submerged - Daniel Lenihan

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PART I

CAVES, DAMS, SHIPWRECKS, AND DREAMS

A passion for extreme diving combines with a vocation as a Park Ranger/Archeologist. Diving caves in Florida and Mexico and shipwrecks in the frigid water of Lake Superior and behind dams in the desert southwest hone the skills needed to form a permanent cadre of underwater archeologists in the National Park Service: The Submerged Cultural Resources Unit or SCRU Team.

CHAPTER ONE

FOR WHOM THE HORN WAILS

The foghorn from the Rock of Ages light at the southern end of Isle Royale National Park wails ominously every five seconds. Its usual dreamy quality is strangely foreboding, oppressive this afternoon. There is no fog about our boat, though the lighthouse is shrouded with wisps of Lake Superior mist. Patches of sunlight play over the glass-calm water surrounding five National Park Service divers grouped on the fantail of the thirty-eight foot motor vessel Superior Diver. The date is June 15, 1982. No one speaks as we intently study the emerald-green expanse of Lake Superior from the stern of our anchored vessel. No flicker of movement, no slick undulating circle disturbs the verdant glass—nothing that would indicate the presence of a diver’s bubbles boiling to the surface. They are late . . . very late, and unspoken fear is tangible. The rising tension has become a sixth member of the team gathered on the deck.

A stopwatch suspended to a clipboard at the divemaster station ticks relentlessly. The mundane instrument has suddenly assumed an unprecedented degree of importance. If the ticking isn’t an indicator that hope is fleeting fast, the foghorn’s plaintive wailing leaves no room for doubt.

I am conscious of a faint slapping against the hull from the wake of a passing boat, and the damp smell of lake water steaming off the recently doffed neoprene dive suits lying on the deck. Body heat, a sign of life; it’s not hard to make a connection to the two suits still more than one hundred feet below in the thirty-four degree lake water.

Lake Superior is not the Caribbean—it is cold, harsh, and extracts heavy penalties for even small mistakes. I have dived over the hulks of many ships that have felt its power, when its explosive temper had turned the placid lake surface into a raging cauldron of foam and freezing spray. Twisted steel and smashed wood mingled at the bottom with the toys of children, bodies of sailors—it is the story we are here to tell. Our task is to unravel the archeological residues of the human dramas that played out in these waters and match them to the written records of the past.

Below us lie the casualties that resulted from the pursuit of great profits in the industrial hotbed of the Great Lakes at the turn of the twentieth century. One more voyage, just one more capital-driven run, taunting the gales of November. How easy it is for us, swimming over the cadavers of ships through silent depths, ice water in our veins, to relate to the victims of disaster; archeology and history had come alive to us on this lake. Now two of our people, like many a Great Lakes ship, had gone missing.

Our divers are meticulous about tracking their bottom time—the period from leaving the surface until the return to the decompression area, a place under the boat that serves as a safe haven. Here they can switch from air tanks on their backs to breathe pure oxygen from regulators attached to long hoses suspended from large green cylinders strapped to the deck; they have unlimited time to slowly complete a safe ascent.

Before they had exceeded their planned arrival time by a full minute, the surface spotter registered enough concern that others began gathering around him, peering into the distance and checking the clipboard notation of the divers’ descent time. When I heard the shuffling of feet and spied the hunched-over form heading toward my bunk, I was already getting my shoes on. The voice inflection of the crew, lack of an undercurrent of banter, and sudden muting of the Waylon Jennings tape alerted me that something was wrong as effectively as an alarm bell.

During the previous decade supervising hazardous diving operations, I had occasionally wondered how I might react to losing a member of my team. I find now that part of my consciousness is operating at warp speed, looking for solutions, while another part stifles images of drowned divers that, unbidden, keep trying to emerge from my memory.

Seconds later, I become strangely detached, reflective. I notice little things, like Jerry Livingston’s hands. Our diving illustrator has strong sensitive hands, those of an artist. Where he leans on the rail, his knuckles are starkly white. He has spoken not a word but his hands tell it all: He thinks they’re in serious trouble. If this lake were a forgiving place, we wouldn’t be here, anchored off Isle Royale, diving on the broken hulks of ten large ships. Archeologists seldom get to pick where they will dive but almost by definition the area won’t be benign.

Ironically, nothing has occurred that would signal a casual observer that we have a problem. No distress calls, no evidence of an accident, but the lack of any sign of the dive team as each precious minute ticks away is a chilling testament that the potential of a tragedy is fast becoming a probability.

Larry Nordby, the blond Viking of a land archeologist who has become a regular on our expeditions, crosses and uncrosses his arms, repeatedly exhales loudly through his nose, and raises his eyebrows in a this-isn’t-happening look when he catches my eye. I know exactly what is going through his mind. Less than four months earlier, he was on the back deck of a park patrol boat in Texas as we surfaced with a lost diver. He’s remembering now how it felt, as we handed up the stiff, lifeless body for him and another ranger to pull into the boat. He’s thinking, I didn’t even know that fellow and these are my friends.

Whatever has happened, the responsibility ultimately rests with me. But there will be time for self-recrimination later. I keep going over the possible scenarios that would result in my divers not being back beneath the boat at the decompression stop, more than forty minutes after their descent. Their maximum depth was to be 120 feet, the absolute limit of their discretion for bottom time, thirty minutes. Even the thirty minute exposure would mean they could no longer come straight to the surface. Both divers must decompress in increments at twenty and ten feet to release excess nitrogen. They are essentially diving under a ceiling, an invisible ceiling they can’t pass through unharmed.

But John and Toni are disciplined divers; they don’t make mistakes like this. They had a long underwater swim to the drop-off, much of it through shallows. Maybe the unusual topography has thrown off their timing . . . I know I’m grasping at straws.

In the Great Lakes, 120 feet is deep. Much deeper than 120 feet in the Bahamas from whence John Brooks had come to join our project. A skilled underwater photographer, he is experienced at greater depths in the tropics: clear, turquoise water, where oppressive cold doesn’t freeze equipment, savage one’s exposed skin, and conspire with the frigid gloom to create a sense of menace that increases in lockstep with depth. John freely admits that the nitrogen narcosis affects his mental acuity here much more severely than it does at identical depths in the Caribbean. He is not alone; it is our third season here, and the rest of us have simply had more time to acclimate.

Then, there is our (my) decision to use dry suits, which utilize air rather than a thin film of water, as do wetsuits, for insulation against the teeth-cracking cold. They keep you much warmer but there’s a tradeoff. Even the newest versions in 1982 are capable of overinflating and sending you in a rush of bubbles, inverted and uncontrolled, toward the surface—something you definitely want to avoid. Lungs can overexpand as pressure drops. Tissue can rupture, allowing air to rush into the bloodstream creating an embolus, or blockage of blood supply to the brain. The effect is much like a massive stroke, resulting in paralysis or death. Because of this Polaris syndrome as our divers grimly refer to it, some agencies had banned the use of dry suits.

But no one is on the surface, no bubbles in sight. What the hell has happened? One of them could have gone through an uncontrolled ascent and embolized, but two? Even in that event, they would still be visible from the boat, unless they hit the surface unconscious, vented, and dropped—but the divemaster would have seen this. Maybe they experienced heavier narcosis or gas problems if the drop-off was deeper than anticipated—but two at the same time?

John’s dive partner is Toni Carrell, who has been with SCRU since its inception. In her mid-thirties, she is well-trained, in good physical shape, experienced in cold water but has only minimal practice with deep diving. She is also a single mother with two children; it’s her birthday and she’s out there because I sent her.

Someone can chase after them, but with no clue where to look, he or she could quickly become part of the problem. Also, all of us have accumulated a nitrogen load from dives this morning that would make us even more likely candidates for a third accident.

Whaddya wanna do, Dan? Larry Sand, the boat operator, has edged out onto the deck. His voice is low, tight in his throat.

Wait.

He indicates with a hitchhiking motion of his thumb a thick blanket of fog moving in from behind us, off the bow. White-out coming.

Jesus.

I can’t send in a search team now without an added complication.

Ordinarily, divers following our underwater baseline back to the boat over the quarter mile jumble of wreck timbers wouldn’t be bothered by the occurrence of the thick fog. But it would be different for rescuers who would have to stray far from the reference lines in search of lost divers. Sound carries well in fog, much as in water; but also as in water, it’s almost impossible to tell where it’s coming from. Stressed divers fifty feet away in a white-out might not be found until they had succumbed to hypothermia. In fifteen minutes our day has turned from the routine of research diving to the gut-wrenching throes of accident management.

Goddamn time! That’s what’s so desperate about the scene of a lost diver compared to other rescue endeavors. No gathering the troops, no reassuring smell of hot coffee, the crinkle of topo maps spread on engine hoods of police cruisers, the knowledge that helo support, search dogs, and fresh faces are on the way. No Houston, we have a problem, and a world-class infrastructure of modern technology leaping in to help. We have only ourselves and time—very little time before their air runs out. Just minutes ticking away with any hope we have; we are it and we have run out of ideas.

More silence, more ticking, more horn blares. Suddenly, we hear a distinct sizzling, then foaming of bubbles far to the left of where we’d been looking. And then, from across the water we hear finally, a male voice: Is she there?

John is alive, and all right; we know it from the way he sounds—maybe with a latent case of the bends, but a survivor. But from his words we know that the team is separated and that Toni, less experienced in deep diving, is still unaccounted for.

A suited surface swimmer goes to assist John, but he waves him off. Even through the neoprene hood and glass face mask covering much of his head, John’s expression registers the stress of his emotions. His voice is strained, husky. I’m okay—Christ, she’s really not here?

John is several minutes short on decompression, but he decides it is worth the risk of not finishing his required stop to fill us in on what happened—to feel like he is helping in some way. Back on board, he shows no symptoms of decompression sickness, but we place him on oxygen to help purge excess nitrogen from his system. Before donning the respirator mask he tells us what he knows. While they were taking photos, Toni swam off on a misunderstood signal; he had no idea how far she had gone or in what direction. In searching for her he had gotten lost himself and overstayed his time.

I am the freshest diver in the group. I reach for my suit. I’m going in.

He understands my meaning, but he just shrugs. Sand knew that people can be revived after as much as an hour in cold water without brain damage. However his gesture serves as a dismissal, eloquent in its simplicity, of the merit he sees in looking for a corpse to resuscitate. Toni will either make it back on her own or she won’t make it. The young boat skipper was raised on the Lakes and is speaking from wisdom beyond his years. But inactivity is no longer possible for me to accept; I am ready to leap out of my skin. I’m going in, I repeat, and start to suit up. I hear Nordby breathe a sigh of approval. He doesn’t disagree with Sand, but, like me, he just can’t handle the waiting.

Suddenly, another flurry of bubbles and Toni’s head pops to the surface, much closer to the boat than had John’s. She calls breathlessly, John, is he here? The blanket of tension evaporates like fog in a sunburst. Loud voices booming in response from the crew reveal the strain of the last twenty-five minutes.

Toni’s voice is choppy, like someone trying to speak loudly while shivering uncontrollably. Our anxious hands drag her almost too roughly onto the dive platform, as if we are afraid the lake will reclaim her if we don’t snatch her from its icy grip. We gather from her staccato commentary through blue lips and chattering teeth that she had been able to decompress in open water after becoming lost. She had held her buoyancy stable for twenty minutes with no line to grasp onto until she completed venting excess nitrogen. The splotchy sun-then-fog lighting conditions we had been experiencing probably precluded any of us from seeing her bubbles. She is shaken but unhurt.

My suddenly rubbery legs carry me below where I sit on my bunk. Toni is all right, John is all right; we’ll unravel the details later. The fog bank has missed us, and the sun is brighter than ever. The rest of the team begins preparations for another dive. Out a side window in the V-berth I spy the green jeans of one of our rangers. He is hunched over, face in his hands, out of sight of his comrades on the fantail. He is sobbing. I know how he feels. Unlike his, my eyes are dry—so is my mouth. I don’t trust myself to be around the others right now.

No one died on this dive; no one was seriously injured. It was one of thousands of dives I would supervise or take part in over the course of my career. No one did anything particularly foolish, no strict diving protocols were broken, but there was no doubt in anyone’s mind that events had begun snowballing toward a fatality. What was most harrowing to me about the experience was that we did nothing to create the problem and we did nothing to solve it. I had no control over the outcome of that incident at any point. That snowball had, through good fortune, stopped on its own before it had rolled us up into a tragedy.

I had always been wont to say that good divers make their own luck, that fortune is in our hands. Even though well before that day on Lake Superior I had felt the loss of friends and retrieved the bodies of fellow divers on numerous occasions, I always felt with certainty that it would never happen to me or those diving under my supervision.

Now, anytime I feel that overwhelming sense of confidence and hubris in our preparations for a dive, even two decades later, humility comes easier. I tend to hear the distant echo of a foghorn at Rock of Ages light in Lake Superior.

CHAPTER TWO

SCRU

For twenty-five years I led a group of National Park Service divers with a unique mission. My handpicked cadre of archeologists and technicians were charged with finding and preserving historic shipwrecks and other sites important to American heritage in U.S. Parks and territorial waters. Officially designated the Submerged Cultural Resources Unit, it was quickly dubbed the SCRU team in the parks.

Formally declared a permanent entity in 1980, SCRU evolved from a five-year pilot project called the National Reservoir Inundation Study (NRIS) that began in 1975 in the Southwest. The program was born within the Park Service and heavily influenced by the agency’s philosophy regarding archeological remains: They are non-renewable public resources and should be removed from where they lay with only the strongest of justifications. Because of the inherent dangers in our profession and the intense pressure exerted on shipwrecks from commercial treasure-hunting interests, our efforts evolved into a crusade—one that came to involve serious risk and unexpected rewards.

During the span of years that SCRU has operated, peace was declared in Vietnam, war declared in the Gulf, AIDS came, the Cold War went, bombs killed smartly, and we all became worried about computer viruses. This is a retrospective on a special group of people who kept focused on the preservation of a little piece of the world during these turbulent times. It is also a personal story—after a quarter century at the helm of the organization our destinies became intertwined.

The SCRU team still dives today although at the turn of the millennium it became the Submerged Resources Center—leaving us to mourn the loss of one of the finest acronyms in government. Happily, that is all we have to mourn. At this writing, the team has never suffered a serious diving-related injury. This is a record of which we are proud but which we know could change any moment. Although the exploits of this team often equaled those of people involved in extreme diving, climbing, and caving, the driving force was not conquest, or because it is there. I can relate to such motives personally but not in my role as head of SCRU.

Rather this is a recollection of adventures, triumphs, failures, and close calls of a tightly bonded group of divers in the context of a serious research program. The scientific, historic preservation, and public service goals were as real as the danger that attended them.

Because we were expected to work on short notice in the full range of diving environments present in the National Park System (including deep, cold, and under ceilings in caves and shipwrecks), I felt compelled to select personnel that had not only the credentials of archeologists, illustrators, or photographers but people who were exceptionally good divers. They had to be ready on short notice to shed lightweight diving skins appropriate to the warm, clear waters of Florida to board a plane and confront an entirely different set of challenges.

They might rendezvous with their bulky dry suits, heavy double cylinders, and deep/under ceiling dive gear that had been air-freighted to places like Alaska, Lake Superior, or Crater Lake. They might leave sea-level diving one day at Cape Cod and arrive two days later to dive in risky high-altitude environments such as Yellowstone Lake at an elevation of 8,000 feet. There, the danger of bends escalated, and the water dropped to almost freezing within fifty feet of the surface.

Then, to add to the unique calling of this group, there was the dual nature of their mission as ranger/archeologists. When they completed a research diving task off the coast of California, they might have to rush back to a reservoir in the desert Southwest where their special skills were needed to help execute the difficult recovery of a victim of drowning. Such events forced them to switch psychological gears as quickly and definitively as they switched diving equipment. They were expected to behave as archeologists in ranger uniforms in the presence of other researchers and to serve as rangers, who happened to also be archeologists, when the mission turned to one of rescue or law enforcement rather than research.

But why all the fuss about historic preservation? What of the romantic lure of treasure? What is underwater archeology? Is there a difference between harvesting antiquities for profit and doing it for science? Are old shipwrecks and prehistoric artifacts going to rot away down there if we don’t get them up for people to enjoy? To understand SCRU, it will be necessary to answer these questions. As we recount the team’s adventures over the course of this book, the answers should become clear.

Perhaps it would be most useful to begin with the observation that neither I nor any other member of SCRU was born a preservationist. I decided to stop being a schoolteacher and go to graduate school in anthropology at Florida State not because of a scholarly lust for knowledge or commitment to protection of archeological sites. Rather, it was because I thought I might eventually find a job in which someone would actually pay me to dive a lot and to look for old treasures underwater.

Mark Twain wrote in Tom Sawyer, There comes a time in every rightly constructed boy’s life when he has a raging desire to go somewhere and dig for hidden treasure. I certainly am not immune to that desire.

Even as a child growing up on the Lower East Side of New York City in the 1950s, I was fascinated by stories of sunken ships of gold under the ominous tidal swirls of the East River. When I first ventured beneath the water’s surface in the late 1960s, I found my hands attracted like magnets to anything old and mysterious, regardless of value.

I found old bottles in the Virgin Islands and War of 1812 cannon-balls in the Patuxtent River off my backyard in Maryland. Even my Labrador retriever was an inveterate artifact hunter in those days. He once showed up on the porch, sopping wet and muddy from a foray along the riverbank, clutching an old bayonet in his mouth. It must have been dropped by a British soldier on his way to torch Washington, D.C., during the War of 1812.

When I arrived in 1970 at Florida State to study anthropology, I spent my weekends exploring water-filled sinkholes and river bottoms, often diving alone and with an ethic regarding artifacts only slightly more sophisticated. By that time, I had come to believe the mastodon bones and projectile points I regularly stumbled across in my dives should be part of our collective heritage and not pilfered—so what was wrong with grabbing up these treasures and taking them to a museum or university? I would be greeted as a hero! Not exactly.

In one of the thousands of sinks in the limestone Swiss cheese that comprises the Florida karst, I saw a particularly interesting display of archeological stratigraphy. Groundwater mixes with surface water in the River Sinks area of Tallahassee, producing the classic case of a river moving under the earth, then bobbing to the surface briefly, before dropping away again. I descended eighty feet into a large, cavernous opening of a sinkhole that was the siphon end of a spring-siphon system.

On this crisp autumn day, the water in River Sink was clear with a dark green tinge, so I was startled all the more by a contrasting flash of bright yellow off to my right. Yellow is one of the first colors of the spectrum to filter out as water gets deeper; eighty feet from the surface it is nonexistent in ambient light. But I was carrying an artificial spectrum in the form of a dive lamp, and its beam had chanced across something metallic yellow.

Moving closer to investigate, my nitrogen-laden mind sluggishly sorted out the identity of the mysterious feature. It was a newspaper vending machine, upside down in the silt. A few feet away and further downslope was another and not far from that one, yet another. The Star Trek sense of discovery that accompanied me on these lonely dives in backwoods sinkholes was momentarily shaken.

I noticed between the angle iron legs of the first box of soggy Tallahassee Democrats another man-made feature. Perhaps an old pail, it was barely extruding from the organic silt that had begun to settle on the boxes. Obviously it had been here longer than the newsstands.

I reached down to give it a tug, and my hands told me what my eyes hadn’t: this wasn’t an old pail, it was an old ceramic pot. In fact it was a very old ceramic pot. Back in the anthropology lab at FSU, the ceramic wizards declared it Wakulla check-stamped, a local type of prehistoric pottery. It had been sitting there for two millennia until it was unceremoniously joined by the Tallahassee Democrat dispenser, several soft drink bottles, and a can of Busch Bavarian beer.

The geological and human processes that occasioned the creation of such artifactual assemblages were the source of considerable interest to me. The newspaper vending machines were there because sinkholes are excellent places to quickly and quietly dispose of things you don’t want found. The upsurge of diving in the area was causing certain inconveniences to the region’s criminally inclined, and not just vending machine vandals. Leon County sheriff’s deputies, alerted by sport divers, were pulling stolen cars and occasional bullet-ridden human bodies from some of the more popular sinkholes.

The angle of repose of sediment in a sinkhole could create bizarre associations of modern-day felons and thousand-year-old victims. In some places, the human remains were dating to mind-boggling ages of ten thousand years ago. And it wasn’t a few nondescript slivers of long bone or a possible carpal that were the prizes waiting to be found. Warm Mineral Springs in Florida produced a human cranium with brain material in it predating the rise of Egypt.

No, I wasn’t greeted as a hero for bringing the pot to the FSU lab. I was given a corner of a table to document the find, a form to fill out, and a lecture on the inadvisability of moving artifacts from context, particularly if I intended to get my masters in anthropology from Florida State. I learned the hard way that one doesn’t remove artifacts without stringent controls nor bestow them as gifts on institutions not prepared to cope with them.

The stern voice of Professor Percy, whose finger was pointed in my face, asserted that carefully documenting the precise location could have determined if this pot was a primary, intentional deposition, or a secondary wash-in from surface runoff. Samples of the surrounding sediment could have been dated and residues in the pot that I had conscientiously cleaned could have revealed the function of the pot. Careful, painstaking removal of the edges of the broken bottom of the ceramic vessel could have determined if the pot had been broken from some mundane use or ceremonially killed as a sacrifice. The nature of the silt on the pot as opposed to that covering the newspaper machines was important, and by the way, what was the date of the newspapers?

You’re kidding, the date of the newspapers?

Ever consider that you had a tight control of how fast sedimentation occurs in River Sink with a dated, flat receptacle gathering silt like a laboratory experiment?

No.

Even the different layers of sediment caught in curves of the pot could have been microscopically examined for pollen to reconstruct the prehistoric micro-environment and contribute to our understanding of regional climate changes over the past two thousand years. The list went on and on. In short, I had behaved like an idiot. I had removed a trinket that might have fetched a few bucks on the antiquity market—but archeologically, my moving it made it next to worthless for unraveling any mysteries of the human past.

I would learn later that shipwrecks were even more powerful archeological sites. They were discrete collections of artifacts from particular cultures at a specific point in time. They offered a snapshot of the whole range of shipboard life. They told about trade, fishing, warfare, social stress, play, community life, personal hygiene, and even sexual preference. They did, that is, unless you fooled with them.

Over the years working with the past in a park setting, I learned that we are diminished in a very real way when we lose a piece of the puzzle from its natural resting place. But relics tell us on more than one level about our roots—not only what we can intellectualize but what we can comprehend in a much deeper sense.

The maritime and naval history of the United States is a compelling story as gleaned from a combination of the written record and archeology. But once the relics have been passed through the hands of the best technicians and displayed in the finest museums and once the historical records have been digested and passed through the heads of the finest historians, there is still an element of distance.

But that distance disappears when one journeys to the depths. Playing one’s light over the twisted remains of hull, the encrusted muzzles of cannon, the gleam of bronze fasteners emerging from wooden beams, while hearing only the sound of air rushing into your lungs—that is a bridge to the past that can be found nowhere but in the natural museums under the sea.

My conviction, which has emerged from thirty years of diving, is that shipwrecks and underwater caves are places where one can touch the past in the most special of ways. SCRU embodied the principle that respecting the past underwater is not a luxury—it’s a necessity.

Our mission didn’t carry the urgency of a researcher creating a new vaccine or a cure for cancer or a successful experiment in creating cold fusion—one has to have perspective. But once the wars are fought and the crises of the moment addressed, we still have the human race trying to comprehend itself. We look to our roots, some in literature, some in the ground, some of the most dramatic on the bed of the sea. Our past is writ large there in shipwrecks, ancient projectile points, ceramic pots, and newspaper vending machines. These artifacts are part of our world, a shrinking world, the only world we’ve got.

CHAPTER THREE

THE FLORIDA CAVES

I there is one place that archeology and extreme diving, two signature elements of the Submerged Cultural Resources Unit, come together, it is in the Florida caves. Due to a fluke of geomorphology, the underwater caves that compose the Florida karst hold the potential for archeological and paleontological finds of great significance.

The process is pretty much the same in all these karst areas—karst being a type-name for this sort of geology taken from a plateau in Yugoslavia. Vegetation grows rampant in the soils of the Southeast, given the moist, warm climate. When leaves fall and vegetation dies, it piles thick on the limestone mantle and decays. When rainwater is added, a mild solution of carbonic acid results, which, given thousands, sometimes millions of years, eats away the porous sedimentary